Findings based on large study of 15,000 Israeli women
WEDNESDAY, July 21, 2021 (HealthDay News) — The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine is associated with a significantly lower risk for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection in pregnant women, according to a study published online July 12 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Inbal Goldshtein, Ph.D., from Maccabi Healthcare Services in Tel Aviv, Israel, and colleagues used data from a pregnancy registry (including 7,530 vaccinated and 7,530 matched unvaccinated women) to assess the association between receipt of the BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine and the risk for SARS-CoV-2 infection among pregnant women.
The researchers noted 118 SARS-CoV-2 infections in the vaccinated group and 202 in the unvaccinated group. In the vaccinated group, 83.8 percent were symptomatic versus 83.2 percent in the unvaccinated group (P ≥ 0.99). However, in the 28 to 70 days of follow-up, there were 10 infections in the vaccinated group and 46 in the unvaccinated group, yielding hazards of infection of 0.33 and 1.64 percent, respectively (absolute difference: 1.31 percent; adjusted hazard ratio, 0.22). Sixty-eight patients reported vaccine-related adverse events, including headache (0.1 percent), general weakness (0.1 percent), nonspecified pain (<0.1 percent), and stomachache (<0.1 percent); no severe reactions were reported.
“In this retrospective cohort study of pregnant women, BNT162b2 mRNA vaccination compared with no vaccination was associated with a significantly lower risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection,” the authors write. “Interpretation of study findings is limited by the observational design.”
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